Top of Mind with Tambellini Group
Top of Mind with Tambellini Group
University Leads Change Through Artificial Intelligence and Chatbots
Is artificial intelligence impacting higher education and, if so, how? That questions is answered in depth in this Top of Mind interview with Dr. Curtis Carver, Vice President of IT and CIO at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. Carver describes his university’s various technology projects currently underway, how they are lightening workloads for faculty and staff, and giving students a competitive advantage.
Hello and welcome to our Top of Mind Podcast. In this program we will sit down with the higher education technology thought leader and discuss the innovative projects they're working on now and into the future. On your host, Katelyn Ilkani, vice president of client services and cybersecurity research at The Tambellini Group. I'm joined today by Dr Curtis Carver, Vice President for information technology and chief information officer at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. Over the next few minutes, we're going to hear Kurt's thoughts on the use of artificial intelligence and chat bots within higher education. Let's get started. Welcome to the program. Kurt,
Speaker 3:I'm delighted to be here. Thanks for the welcome.
Speaker 2:Thank you for joining us today. Oh, go ahead.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I'm looking forward to the discussion of the topic. Go ahead.
Speaker 4:No problem.
Speaker 2:What are some things that come to mind for you when you think about artificial intelligence in higher education?
Speaker 3:Well, I see artificial intelligence really a continuation of the trajectory that higher education has been on. I'm really over the last couple of decades. We think back 10 years ago we were having these deep conversations about, you know, traditional classes and hybrid classes and online classes, and the role of the learning management system. And today we don't have those conversations at the university. Every undergraduate class has a presence and the learning management system, when you look to the future, what you're going to see is that artificial intelligence is going to be another point along that trajectory of a more connected, more intentional, a more intelligent university focused on educating and inspiring the next generation of leaders of our world. And so while it's a cutting topic now it's kind of like LMS was 10 years or so ago, where, we were looking at the potential of this, but I think it aligns with that engagement with our students and changing how they think about the world. So I think that was a very promising future for artificial intelligence as it applies to higher education.
Speaker 2:That's a really fascinating thought that in 10 years we may be talking about artificial intelligence in use across institutions. Like we really think about learning management systems and kind of take it for granted. It's fascinating how quickly technology is changing and then how we adapt to that.
Speaker 3:Yeah. I think if you look at, if you go back even a little bit, longer ago when you were writing an academic paper, you'd go to the library and you'd go to a card file and you would look up your references and then you'd go into the stacks and go try to find that paper that's augmented. Now all of that's on the web and you're typically using a search engine, a like Galileo in Georgia, or simply Google, our research scholars to actually pull that type of information up and insert it into your document to support research. So I think it's just a continuation of accelerating how our students learn how to think critically by taking some of the more mundane tasks off their plate and allowing them to be more intentional and action oriented.
Speaker 2:Well, Kurt, how is your institution specifically preparing for these innovations? Are you deploying any technologies that use AI?
Speaker 3:Yeah, we are. We've got two technologies deployed already and a third one that we're on the cusp of deploying. The first two are intelligent agents that are acting on behalf of the faculty based on either a student's attendance in class or student performance, so the first agent monitoring students' attendance, and if they stopped consuming content in the learning management system, then it sends on behalf of the Faculty member a note, asking what's going on in their life, telling them they're not going to pass the course. Obviously if they don't attend the course and consuming the content, but it's really a focus on what's going on. How can we help you? And having used the system for a number of years, I can tell you my personal experience so that as 100 percent yield, the students always email me back, they always tell me exactly what's going on that's causing them to drift away from consuming the content and then they promise to change their behavior so that they do consume the content. And then they followed through on that. The system normally doesn't have to send them another note. So that idea of intrusive advising them, asking them what's going on and relating to that core concept of you have to attend, you have to be present to learn, at least virtually, helps keep those kids on track and helps the university with its progression, graduation and retention rates. And then the second agent actually monitors their performance on assessments, so it's looking at quizzes and midterm and their final. And then they're giving feedback from the students as well. The agent automatically sends a note on behalf of the Faculty member and congratulates them on you quiz or doing well on the midterm. Um, and again, I use that system and have the students email me back and say, Dr Carver, you're so funny. No, it's not me, it's the agent. And they appreciate that, that celebration of them doing well on that, they don't do well. They get a different note that points them to ask them if there's anything we can do to help get them back on track. But this idea of intrusively engaging and the notes that I'm mentioning are all written by the faculty. They write them once. The agent just automates that process of monitoring and sending on behalf of the faculty members. So it takes work off of the faculty member leads to increase student engagement and in and, and leads to increased revenue to the institution through those increased graduation progression and retention rates. And then the agent that we're working on right now is a chatbot technology that allows us to go and to automate those same types of tasks. And let me give you some examples of that. So the way the chatbot works is the intended for it to be university wide and it to lead to more engagement and more action oriented intentional activity by not only our students but our staff and faculty and everyone else. What's a good example of that is, um, a good example of that is a student coming in and trying to apply to the university bought our admissions office is closed because it's 11:00 at night. Well, the chatbot can answer a whole bunch of those types of questions and hope the students through that process. The same is true for existing students. Then finding out what their balances, what their core schedule is. You know, how many people can be on the final project of a specific class. We want to take that work off of our normal staff because candidly, it doesn't take a lot of intelligence to answer those questions if you do it all the time. And it's a tremendous service to those prospective students or current students. We want to apply that to our staff, to our researchers, to all of those folks. And so that's the intent of the new deployment and there are other universities that are working at this now and that's why I'm pretty confident that these types of technologies are just going to permeate higher education. Again, it's this ability to make things more action oriented. Again, you need only imagine the world without, you know, a bling or bing or google. And then imagine higher education without those tools specifically focused on the information within the university that helps that student progress, I'll retain and graduate.
Speaker 2:Do you see significant cost savings to the institution with these technologies?
Speaker 3:I do because again, those faculty, those staff that were sitting there answering these types of questions that really don't require a whole bunch of intelligence can actually use their skills and competencies to do work on higher order tasks. And so that's the intent behind the that this will generate a savings. I was actually talking with two clinicians and they were talking about how they could use this actually in a medical clinic, and it would accelerate what they're doing when they've got a patient actually right there, uh, and the ability to have this kind of functionality built in that's very intentional. You look at applying for research grants, same thing there. There are components of that that would create a competitive advantage for the university. If you look at someone trying to give money to the university, again, this will be able to extend the hours of the relations staff or the advancement staff and allow them to use that information so that people want to give you money, make it easy for them to give you money as long as you do it legally. And that's what are the chatbox technology will allow us to do.
Speaker 2:So this brings to mind a bit of a different conversation about AIchanging the ways that we work. What type of responsibility do you think institutions have to prepare their students for how AI will change the ways that we live in work?
Speaker 3:That's a great question. I think part of this is understanding that ai at its core, especially at this level, there's a certain degree of programming that is going on in programming, doesn't mean that it's perfect for branding. You can see from all the patches we get to our software that software is not written perfectly. And so the, as we look at our students, just like we prepare them to evaluate, news and information and media, they're going to have to evaluate the answers that come back from these systems that suggestions that come back, we're going to have to apply judgment and wisdom. And so that ability to think critically becomes even more important in this age of artificial intelligence and information overload. The ability to determine which systems to trust, which systems not to trust which systems have bias built into them, that have to be addressed kind of like the news feeds that we received today. In terms of being able to detect the bias, evaluated independently and then reach a appropriate decisions.
Speaker 2:Let's go back to talking about chat bots specifically. What is all the buzz about chatbots today? What's going on with that?
Speaker 3:Well, the chatbot was the technology that was originally developed and used principally within IT organizations or customer service organization. So typically when you go to a website and you see, you know, as it says, hi, I'm John and I'm here to help you. Do you have any questions about buying this system? Or this product was like probably a chat bot that the, the, that is the initial stages of that interaction with a customer. A lot of those questions can be predicted and even strings of questions can be predicted and programmed in. We use the same thing with a lot of help desks have chat bot technology applied to it to take work off of that help desk and allow the help desk to um, answer more sophisticated questions. But the customers are more satisfied because they're receiving immediate feedback. They think it's a person, it's not, it's actually a program's code. There's cost savings there and then there's greater utilization of the staff that you do have their assets. They are answering the more difficult questions that don't come up very often. And then part is a feedback loop by monitoring the questions that come up, you can determine what new questions and answers I need to be added to the system.
Speaker 2:And what kind of efficiencies do you think chatbots will provide when you're in the midst of deploying your own Chat Bot? What are your own expectations?
Speaker 3:Well, I think that's a good question. If you look at this, we really don't know yet. There are other universities, as I mentioned, that have deployed this and done it or subsets of the university. We're kind of looking at doing this broadly of using this within advancement within athletics, of looking at how, how do we not put more work on our staff, but how do we take something off of what our staff and our faculty are doing? How do we delight our customers across the university by that engagement? And our belief is that's going to lead to some process optimization. Some definite cost efficiencies as we have staff focused on more highly valued work. And then also lead to revenue growth within advancement within research and within our student retention progression and graduation rates. So because that generates tuition for the university. So the idea here is we don't know the answer yet. We think it will be substantial.
Speaker 2:Well Great. I can't wait to hear about the progress of your project and what kind of outcomes you end up having in the next 24 months.
Speaker 3:Yeah, we're, we're, we're really excited about how this was going to play out in that it did a pretty quick in the delivery on that chatbox technology, the underlying technology all works. We've got to work on the content creation now.
Speaker 2:So we talked about efficiency is broadly what kind of things are you expecting in regards to the constituent experience? What kind of impact are you thinking you're going to see with your students and faculty and staff?
Speaker 3:Well, if I think we do it the right way, we're going to allow students to be more intentional. To have the right information to make the right decisions will definitely have a broader base. Instead of calling a number or searching for a website, you're just asking a question and immediately being pointed to the right information source to get that the right place to take an action to move your educational experience or your research experience forward. So I think it has broad spread applicability, widespread applicability, and it's going to end up the delighting folks. Again, I mentioned the example. There are a fair number of organizations at a university that are really eight to five. Our students don't work eight to five where they would prefer not to work eight to five. They're studying all the time. They're innovating and learning all the time and you want that ability to at least virtually be there to help them as they're going through that product. Same with our faculty. Our faculty are working all the time. I don't know a single faculty member who works eight to five, so they're working seven days a week. They're trying to change the world. You want to make it easy for them to do the things that they need to do and sometimes of asking questions or figuring out a process or submitting some form and so to the extent that you can automate that process, make it easy for them to take something off their plate and allow them to focus on their disciplinary expertise, then you're going to ultimately delight them. And so that's why I think this has very widespread functionality within the modern research university.
Speaker 2:So there seems to be a lot of positives to deploying chatbots institution-wide. But what about downsides? Do you think there are any negatives?
Speaker 3:Well, I don't know that I would characterize them as negatives, but I would say that there is risk associated with chatbot with any, you know, artificial intelligence system. And so you could have, if you're working, you know, a lot of the systems we're working on, you could have collaborative risk. Okay. And that's a risk where you're trying to help facilitate collaboration or solving something, but you don't have the right questions in there. You've got the wrong way. And so the, the user ends up becoming, I'm a frustrated with the system and moves on to do something else. I think you also have what's called viral risk. And so viral risk is where the intelligent agent is spreading, or artificial intelligence system is fighting a bad decision across a whole series of other systems in a good example of that is a driverless car that, that has risk outside the actual car. It can hit other cars that can get people that can hit animals. And so, uh, the, the, the, the bad decisions can spread and, um, ultimately lead to a decision at a larger scale. And then finally, if you've got automated systems that are doing, you know, advanced training or advanced collaboration or advanced design or decision support, it can, you can have a cascading risk associated with that. So there was risk in how you build your AI systems and how you deploy them, as you might imagine, the three systems I described are at that very much lower level of risk on the chart. And we were starting there because we think we can manage that risk to an acceptable level and that the benefits outweigh the risks. Do you think as you're looking at different types of systems—driverless cars is something that people are familiar with—there's clearly risk in that system and those, those, types of systems or you know, if you were to automate traffic signs and have those all controlled by intelligent agents will ultimately we will get there, but there is significant risk there and so those types of projects are going to go a bit slower. And those are not as interesting yet at the university level in terms of taking work off of faculty, staff or students or creating a competitive advantage for them.
Speaker 2:Those are great points. Kurt, I've really enjoyed learning from you today and hearing all your thoughts on this topic. It seems like there's a lot of innovation that will happen within ai and chatbots and institutions in a relatively short amount of time. Do you have any last thoughts you would like to leave with our listeners?
Speaker 3:Well, I think it's an exciting time to be in higher education. It's a time where there is a great deal of change taking place, a great deal of a thoughtful inquiry into how to get our students to critically think in a rapidly changing world. And how do we support that in person? Is it hybrid? Is it online? Is the regurgitation of information really meaningful in an era where you can google anything? And so the answer is yes, actually it is for certain things and so that the artificial intelligence I think is going to change everything. I think it is to your point going to change everything pretty quickly. I think those universities and commercial organizations that are embracing it have a competitive advantage as they prepare for the future. And it kind of goes back to, you had asked earlier about students and what we should tell them and prepare them is to let them know that this is a big change, not only at the university but within our society. And they didn't say great area to study and to work in for the next, a hundred, hundred and 50 years or so as we fully flesh out this kind of technology and parts of it are going to go very, very fast. And then other parts are going to, whole ecosystems are going to build this way, is that we probably can't even imagine yet. And so it's an exciting time to be at the university and it's an exciting time to be working in artificial intelligence.
Speaker 2:Well, thank you so much for participating today on our Top of Mind podcast. Kurt.
Speaker 3:Delighted to be with you and thanks for the opportunity to chat with a larger audience about what's going on here at the University of Alabama at Birmingham and what's going on in artificial intelligence.
Speaker 2:Thank you so much. This concludes our Top of Mind podcast. Thank you for listening. And please check in with us next month.